There will be a documentary on at 9 PM tonight on MSNBC. I think it's good to remind ourselves that nobody is hopeless. Also note it's the human connection, the sense of belonging that brought him into the movement. And the human connection with people of different races got him out. Powerful stuff, IMHO.

Christian Picciolini was recruited into America’s first skinhead group, Chicago Area Skinhead, when he was a young teenager. He was frequently bullied at school and felt abandoned by his parents, Italian immigrants who worked so hard to make a living that he rarely saw them.

Mr. Picciolini became an international leader in the movement, but was eventually impelled to leave it through the compassion he was shown by the very people he thought he hated. By his count, he has since helped more than 200 individuals – including not only white supremacists but also ISIS members and potential school shooters – exit a life of hate by giving them a new sense of identity, community, and purpose.

Picciolini is the host and narrator of a new documentary produced by Part2Pictures, “Breaking Hate,” which traces the story of how he helped a Charlottesville protester walk away from the neo-Nazi views he espoused – with the help of Susan Bro, whose daughter was killed in the protests. The following is a transcript of a Monitor interview with Picciolini ahead of the documentary’s airing on MSNBC on Sunday, Aug. 12, at 9 p.m. Eastern. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Of the four finalists, McConnell told Trump that Hardiman and Kethledge would make it through the Senate, and said so publicly. It's unusual for the Majority Leader to basically tell the President who to pick, in public. It must mean that McConnell was trying to box Trump into picking one of those two. Which means he knows there are Republicans who won't vote for Kavanaugh. But of course, Trump picked the guy who thinks presidents can't be indicted.

The first time was the infamous Dred Scott decision. It was an outrageous decision. It wasn't just about slavery being legal in slave states. It also said that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, declared the Missouri Compromise illegal, and took away citizenship from African Americans in free states. That is, the goal was to make slavery legal EVERYWHERE. People were outraged. It led directly to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1858 and Lincoln's victory in 1860.

The Second time was during the New Deal. In Roosevelt's first term, the Supreme Court struck down many New Deal programs as unconstitutional. Roosevelt complained that the nation was being held back by "nine old men." The Democrats won a resounding victory in 1936. Not only was Roosevelt re-elected, they gained 12 seats in the House and 5 seats in the Senate, extending their already huge advantage. Shortly after this victory, The Supreme Court upheld a state minimum wage law, something they had decided against less than a year earlier. Both decisions were 5-4. Justice Owen Roberts had switched sides, and he would continue to side with the liberals in future New Deal cases. Memoirs of both Justice Roberts and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes stated that they both took on a more liberal view in response to the popular vote.

On Edit: After a few comments, I add this. Both times the American people won looked very different from each other. I don't think we are headed for civil war and I don't think any conservative justice will switch sides. So if it happens a third time, it will probably look very different. Perhaps it will be by court packing after 2020. Roosevelt tried that and failed in 1937, but as he himself said, "he lost the battle but won the war."

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An overlooked clue to the likely coming Cohen flip: his new lawyer is a former SDNY prosecutor who worked with Comey & for Preet. And every single one of his partners in his firm is an SDNY USAO veteran who either worked for &/or with Comey or Preet. They were hired to do a deal.

If spiritual experiences have a neurobiological basis, does that mean we will always have some form of religion with us? For purposes of this discussion, I'd like to point out that religion does not equal belief in gods. There are religions that don't have gods or where gods are minor elements. But all religions talk of spiritual experiences.

Date:
June 1, 2018
Source:
Yale University

Yale scientists have identified a possible neurobiological home for the spiritual experience -- the sense of connection to something greater than oneself.

Activity in the parietal cortex, an area of the brain involved in awareness of self and others as well as attention processing, seems to be a common element among individuals who have experienced a variety of spiritual experiences, according to a study published online May 29 in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

"Spiritual experiences are robust states that may have profound impacts on people's lives," said Marc Potenza, professor of psychiatry, of the Yale Child Study Center, and of neuroscience. "Understanding the neural bases of spiritual experiences may help us better understand their roles in resilience and recovery from mental health and addictive disorders."

Spiritual experiences can be religious in nature or not, such as feeling of oneness in nature or the absence of self during sporting events. Researchers at Yale and the Spirituality Mind Body Institute at Columbia University interviewed 27 young adults to gather information about past stressful and relaxing experiences as well as their spiritual experiences. The subjects then underwent fMRI scans while listening for the first time to recordings based on their personalized experiences. While individual spiritual experiences differed, researchers noted similar patterns of activity in the parietal cortex as the subjects imagined experiencing the events in the recordings.

Rudy Giuliani on Saturday threatened to take special counsel Robert Mueller to court if he attempts to issue a subpoena against President Trump.

"If Mueller tries to subpoena us, we're going to court," Giuliani said in an interview with ABC News. Giuliani, a former New York City mayor, joined Trump's legal team in April.

Giuliani’s warning arrived just hours after The New York Times revealed that Trump's lawyers sent Mueller a 20-page letter in January arguing that Trump couldn’t obstruct justice because he has unfettered authority over all federal investigations.

In his book, the Politics that Presidents Make, Stephen Skoworek outlnes an influential theory of presidential politics that postulates that presidents are made or broken based on their position in "political time" which defines what type of president he is and how successful. He looked at every presidential election since 1800 to develop this theory. He proposed 4 types of presidents:
1) Reconstructive - A president who creates a new political coalition in a regime that dominates the next few decades, ex. Roosevelt, Reagan.
2)Affiliated - A president from the reconstructive president's party who succesfully continues the regime, ex Truman, Johnson, Bush I, Bush II.
3) Preemptive - A president from the opposing party who opposes the regime with limited success - ex. Eisenhower, Clinton, Obama.
4) Dysjunctive - A president from the reconstructive president's party who comes late in the regime and unsuccessfully tries to continue the regime with modifications, ex. Hoover, Carter.

To see how this works, let's start with Carter. In 1976, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency. In theory, they held all the cards. Carter tried to continue the Roosevelt regime, bringing in new environmental regulations, but also went against it by cutting other regulations and trying to cut spending. He also unsuccessfully tried to enact healthcare and energy legislation. He didn't get along well with Congress He spent most of his first two years with underwater ratings and lost seats in Congress in 1978. He was unpopular in 1978 to 80, mishandling things like the energy crisis, a bad economy and the Iran crisis. Then, of course, he barely beat back a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy and then he lost to Reagan. Reagan won in a landslide, taking over the Senate and gaining 34 seats in the house. He went on to become a reconstructive president - creating the current Republican orthodoxy of tax cuts, free trade, amnesty for immigrants, deregulation and slashing the social safety net. We've operating under these assumptions ever since. We've all lived through all or most of this era, so I don't need to tell you about it.

Let's jump ahead to Trump. In theory, Republicans hold all the cards. But they are having a hard time holding to together. Trump is trying to break with Republican orthodoxy on immigration and free trade. He's had no legislative successes except (barely) for tax cuts. He doesn't get along with Congress. His ratings are underwater. He sounds like a dysjunctive president so far. If this theory holds, then there will in fact be a blue wave, he will face a primary challenge (several Repubs have already expressed interest in this) but a new fresh-faced Democrat will overcome a crowded field and win in a landslide with new ideas that will last a generation.

That's why I think the Blue Wave is real, despite Trump's rabid base and the supposedly safe red districts. If so, it won't Mueller or his crazy tweets that do Trump in. It will just be our moment in political time.

The term gets used here a lot, but I honestly don't know what it means. I've never used it prior to participating in the Religion Group here at DU. Some hypotheses I have about what it might mean are:
- a specific belief
- a random belief
- a group of related beliefs
- a group of unrelated beliefs
- a world view
- an ethical view
- a religious faith

There are probably other possibilities. All of them seem to fit some contexts but not others. Sometimes it seems assumed that everybody has one. Other times it seems more like it's recommended we should have one, and if we don't bad things might happen. Can anyone enlighten me?